Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 21 October 2021

Joint Oireachtas Committee On Key Issues Affecting The Traveller Community

Travellers' Experiences in Prison and Related Matters: Discussion

Mr. Séamus Beirne:

I will take that question if the Vice Chairman does not mind. I agree that racism for people of colour is more obvious and people recognise racism more against that cohort. There are additional problems of identifying racism towards Travellers. We will have to develop our training and we will probably be doing that in consultation with the Travellers in Prison Initiative, Ms Costello, the St. Stephen's Green Trust and so forth, and we will perhaps get some Traveller peer educators as well. As I mentioned earlier, as part of our training, we get some travellers from the Traveller Mediation Service who come in and deliver talks to our trainees. It is good to get the voice of the Travellers in that area. It is something that we will look into and develop.

We will not be just doing a module of training. This is ongoing year on year because we need to keep it fresh and reinforce it. We have new staff coming in and people getting promoted. We also need to focus on the prisoner population, which is very transient. We need to get the message out there that it is not appropriate among the prisoners either. I take the Vice Chairman's point.

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